Kazimierz Świątek

Kazimierz Świątek a adăugat 3 fotografii

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Kazimierz Cardinal Świątek (Belarusian: Казімір Свёнтак, romanized: Kazimir Sviontak; 21 October 1914 – 21 July 2011) was a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church who was most known for his resistance to Cold War-era Soviet communism and for his service in Minsk, Belarus. Cardinal Swiatek was the former Metropolitan Archbishop of Minsk-Mohilev, and Apostolic Administrator of Pinsk. Świątek was born to Polish parents in the municipality of Walk, in what was then the Russian Empire, the present-day municipality of Valga, Estonia. His family was deported to Siberia during the Russian Revolution. His father died fighting in the Polish-Soviet War. The future Cardinal lived in newly independent Poland from 1922. After completing his philosophical and theological studies at the seminary in Pinsk, Świątek was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1939, and then was sent to the parish of Pruzhany. The Soviet Union occupied Pinsk after the Nazi-Soviet Pact divided Poland in 1939. Świątek was arrested by the NKVD in April 1941, and held on death row in Brest for two months. Father Świątek escaped from prison, taking advantage of the confusion caused by the Nazi German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, and returned to Pruzhany.…Citește mai mult

Kazimierz Świątek a adăugat 2 fotografii

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Death On 21 July 2011, Świątek died in Pinsk after a long illness, aged 96. At the time of his death, he was the second oldest member of the College of Cardinals. Pope Benedict XVI sent a telegram to Archbishop Kondrusiewicz and the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Belarus expressing his condolences for the Cardinal's death and praising him for his lengthy service as Cardinal Archbishop and his continuing fidelity and loyalty to the Church and to Christ during his periods of imprisonment back in the early years of the Cold War, in the post-war period, when the Church in the Soviet Union had to be largely clandestine.